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'Nezar' is an Arabic name. My father was Lebanese and my mom was American. I was
born in Dearborn, Michigan and then we moved to Lebanon for about two years.
After the [civil war in Lebanon] started we lived in Saudi Arabia; then we
lived in Egypt. I think I moved around between five or six different places in
the States; then I went back to live in Syria for a while, and now I am in Los
Angeles.
I think English is my first language because of my time in American schools and
universities, that is what I write in, but Arabic is also my language.
Depending on where I am, I could be thinking in that language too.
My father was Muslim but he belonged to a sect called the Druse. These are
considered by some Muslims to be outside of mainstream Islam. But if you really
look at Islam and the history of Islam, [the Druse] are very much part of
Islamic history, which has literally thousands of different sects and different
movements that are quite different than the typical image of what Islam is. So
I consider myself Muslim.
My dissertation is on Creative Historical Imagination in Arabic literature; or
literature related to the Arab in the Arab world. A couple of chapters are
actually about the rewriting of Andalusia and how this period has been
re-imagined, not just by Arabic speakers but also by people like Salman Rushdie
or even in American literature, Washington Irving.
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